Brian Allain

A Call to Prayer

From “Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechner” by Frederick Buechner BECAUSE THE WORD that God speaks to us is always an incarnate word – a word spelled out to us not alphabetically, in syllables, but enigmatically, in events, even in the books we read and the movies we see – the chances […]

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what I wanted to become

From “How Will You Measure Your Life?” by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon The likeness – the person I want to become – was the simplest of the three parts, and was largely an intellectual process… I distilled the likeness of what I wanted to become:

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how to read a book spiritually

From “Discernment: Reading the Signs of Daily Life” by Henri Nouwen with Michael J. Christensen and Rebecca J. Laird Jean-Pierre do Caussade, in his eighteenth-century letters to those for whom he served as spiritual director, provides specific instructions on how to read a book spiritually: If you are to get from it all the good

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Limits and Potentials

From “Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation” by Parker J. Palmer Each of us arrives here with a nature, which means both limits and potentials. We can learn as much about our nature by running into our limits as by experiencing our potentials.

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The Need for Self-Reflection

From “What Makes You Come Alive: A Spiritual Walk with Howard Thurman” by Lerita Coleman Brown Disentangling what we are told about ourselves from what resonates inside of us requires ongoing self-reflection. “Women without children are abnormal.” “Black people aren’t smart enough to complete graduate school.” “I wouldn’t live in that neighborhood.” These are but

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Community

From “The Language of the Soul: Meeting God in the Longings of Our Hearts” by Jeff Crosby “Community cannot take root in a divided life. Long before community assumes external shape and form, it must be present as seed in the undivided self: only as we are in communion with ourselves can we find community

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